


Everything Changes, Nothing Perishes

by orphan_account



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Oblique Roski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-17
Updated: 2013-06-17
Packaged: 2017-12-15 07:57:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Tyler tries very hard to be brave in all situations, but it gets difficult when one is trapped in the Wardrobe and he's getting closer.</p>
<p>[Written for the TARDIS Ficathon; Title taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything Changes, Nothing Perishes

**Author's Note:**

> In which I reference 4 Doctors, 3 other fandoms, and throw in a bit of Roski just for the hell of it. (Also this is 2 weeks late and I am very, very ashamed.)

Rose Tyler had never felt more like a rat in a trap.

The TARDIS corridors seemed more twisted and maze like than they ever had before, and for once the adrenaline (tinged for the first time with the bitter edge of true fear) coursing through her veins didn’t make the running feel like just another adventure. After all, Rose had gotten lost in the TARDIS more than once before, but those had been hours spent wandering through different rooms, and, at the end of the day, she always ended up in the Smaller Blue Kitchen with a cup of tea and the Doctor. But now she had run so far and so fast that her breath was coming in tight gasps, and her side had cramped in several distinctly painful ways. She was well and truly lost, as likely to find herself in any of the numerous tiny TARDIS cupboards as she was her bedroom or the familiar control room.

“Come on, old girl,” Rose hissed, leaning against the wall with her hands on her knees, trying desperately to catch her breath, and still not sure if the TARDIS was contorting the corridors to help her or the…

But she could hear someone pounding their way up a nearby hallway, and so she took off again, turning left the first time the hallway branched, away from the noise of her pursuer’s steps. It seemed like it took ages until all she could hear were her own footsteps and the quiet hiss of the TARDIS’s environmental systems, and she let a sigh of relief slip between her lips. Then the sounds of pursuit were back, louder and closer than ever before, and she felt her breath freeze in her lungs. She lunged for the first door she came to, but found it locked and unyielding.

“Please!” Rose practically sobbed, tugging once more at the stubbornly locked door before she took off down the hallway, her chest tight with fear. _“I need to be brave,”_ she told herself, _“I need to think.”_

But oh, she had never been more afraid than she was just then with the footsteps behind her getting closer and closer. She could practically feel his hot breath on the back of her neck when she finally came to another, blessedly unlocked, door which she flung open and charged into. It took a moment for her fear confused mind to realize that the room was not, in fact, empty and that she was pushing her way through racks of clothes. The Wardrobe room. It was, all things considered, one of the rooms that Rose knew the best. After all, there were few things she enjoyed more than stepping into crisp 18th century London air in period dress, or walking through exotically scented bazaars on some non-terrestrial world with her hair pulled back in their traditional barrettes. She could spend hours digging through the trunks where the Doctor kept bits and bobs that he had picked up on his travels. _“Oh, that little thing?”_ he would say, holding up a poodle skirt or a dress made out of the fur of an animal that she couldn’t even begin to name (because really, what evolutionary purpose could naturally fluorescent pink fur serve?). _“Funny story about that one, really. This one time I was on Delta Vega…”_

But now she dashed through the aisles, roughly shoving the clothing aside. She darted past a long rack featuring a red and cream colored jumper, a scarf so long that it had been looped around its hanger six times in order to keep its ends off the floor, and a dark and distinguished frock coat; past a shelf with hastily folded black robes, complete with their red, blue, green, and gold emblems; past a table where several mini-dresses in primary colors had been carelessly thrown along with black leather boots, black nylons, and unfamiliar boxy black technology. Then, so abruptly that she ran into it and was left with stinging palms, she found the back wall of the Wardrobe.

She stumbled back a little with a groan, inspecting her already injured palms. Palms that were scraped from when he had lunged at her and she had tumbled backwards into the road, her hands stopping her fall to the asphalt; red and stinging from when she had tried to grab his arm and he had flung her away so hard that she flew a few feet before she even hit the ground; bloody from when she had scrambled away to run through the unfamiliar streets of the tiny moon that she had been visiting with the Doctor as she tried desperately to find her way back to the TARDIS in the hopes that she would be safe there…

But now, still choking down her dread, she turned to the other wings of the Wardrobe and then stopped dead. The left wing was fully illuminated, but the right wing sat in darkness, and even as Rose watched, the lights in the left flickered off as well. She took a hesitant step towards the left, but she was overcome with such a horrible sense of wrongness that she stopped and then slowly turned to the right. Now she felt a pull, like the air from the ducts overhead was pushing her towards that wing. And so, with faintly shaking steps, Rose began to feel her way between the racks with as much haste as she dared.

As she got further back into the Wardrobe, the room began to smell more musty, more like dust and clothes that had lain too close together for too long. Finally, as her hands began to brush over cool leather, she felt an electric shock like a shiver going up her spine.

“What’s here?” Rose whispered. “Somethin’ that’ll help?”

The TARDIS remained irritatingly silent.

Rose let out a faint “Hmph,” and began to paw through the rack anyway, trusting now that the Ship was trying to help her. She hadn’t known that the Doctor owned so much leather: leather shirts, leather pants, leather skirts, and even one strange full length leather jacket, lined with green and with gold metal edging, which hung directly underneath a gleaming golden helmet with huge curved horns. But then she felt her hands touch familiar cracked leather and she stopped. _“Of course he kept it,”_ she thought, unsurprised, as she brushed her fingers down the sleeve and her stomach twisted with the sickness that comes from loosing a best friend (an almost lover). But then she heard the door to the Wardrobe slam open.

Her heart twisted in her chest, and she ripped the old leather jacket off its hanger and dived in amongst the leather, ending up crouched behind all the clothes, directly underneath the golden helmet, the jacket clutched in her sweaty hands. The knowledge that she couldn’t run anymore hung heavy over her head. (After all, the right wing of the wardrobe didn’t connect to anything else. Even she knew that.) And so she hid, stifling her breathing as best she could, trying to find where it was that her courage was hiding, preparing herself for the confrontation she knew was coming as best as she could.

She could hear him crashing through the wardrobe, overturning racks as he went, breathing heavily, and she pressed her face into the leather, breathing in the last remnants of its owner’s distinctive cologne, as if she was hoping that from it she could borrow some of his coolness in the face of danger. For a moment she let her mind be drawn away from her current terror, to remember how when they visited other worlds, he used to take off this jacket and drape it around her shoulders whenever he saw her shivering (although never without a good natured jibe about her inferior ape physiology). Now she threw it around her shoulders like some sort of shield, missing him terribly.

_“This_ ,” she thought, a little traitorously, “ _Would never have happened if he were here.”_

The thought was unfair, but she still wondered if he would have been able to protect her.

And then the footsteps were right beside her and he was there, almost growling, ripping back the leather above her head and standing above her, his teeth barred and his suit ripped and dirtied. He reached out for her, with the same bruising strength she had experienced on the moon, but before he could touch her, she spoke up, trying one last time to calm this raging anger that she couldn’t understand with words.

“Doctor!” Her tone suffused with all the calm she could manage. “Doctor, wait. Don’ you understand me?”

For a moment she though that he would calm, but then a true growl began to rumble up from his chest, and she could practically see his hackles rising.

“Doctor, please. I know you don’ wan’ta hurt me,” she continued soothingly, and again she thought she saw something change in his eyes, but then he lashed out and she was sure that he would hit her directly (not those glancing blows from the planet) with his fully augmented Time Lord strength, and she flinched away from him, shielding her head with her arms.

But the blow never came.

Instead, when she looked up, she found that the Doctor had been thrown clear into the opposite wall, and all around her a fine gold filament seemed to hang in the air. She stood up and lightly touched it, only to have it dissolve into dust and fade into nothing. Before her, the Doctor was already stirring, and for a moment she was afraid that he was still possessed by whatever madness had come over him. But when she looked closer, she found him starring at her with a very gentle look in his eyes.

“He’ll always come back to you,” the Doctor whispered. “He’s coming now, Rose.” And then he fell limply back to the floor, but Rose was already running to him, gently cupping his face and bringing his head up onto her lap (and trying to convince herself that that faint northern accent and pronoun mistake were due to the head injury he had just received, and besides, didn’t loads of planets have a north?). He could barely hold his eyes open, but his lips were moving, and when she leaned down, he whispered, “Gods, Rose, I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

“Shhh, come on now.” She murmured, brushing back his hair from his forehead and letting her fingers linger on his temple. “I’m alright. Tell me what you need.”

But he just shook his head, and, as he turned his head towards her stomach, automatically seeking warmth as he always did when he was hurt or tired, he gently took her hand in his, careful to avoid bother her scrapes. And she shoved her free arm through the old leather jacket’s too long sleeve and shifted him more comfortably into her lap and stroked her fingers through his hair. The TARDIS brought up the lights enough to see by and the ship seemed to hum around the Time Lord and his companion, a hum as familiar to this tenth incarnation as it had been to the ninth.

And behind them, unnoticed, the huge and gleaming golden helmet’s edges burned white hot.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like this fic sets up a whole Roski series very well... unfortunately I don't actually ship it myself. (But I might write it anyway? Don't hold me to that.)
> 
> Ok. We're done here.


End file.
